


Almost There

by AliceInKinkland



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Bisexuality, Breaking and entering is a good first date activity right?, Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 17:27:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12893055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AliceInKinkland/pseuds/AliceInKinkland
Summary: Memory is a funny thing.





	Almost There

**Author's Note:**

> Set at the end of 1.19, "Hot Dogs." Except, like, Veronica's second make-out session with Logan, where they decide to maybe see each other but keep it on the DL? Let's just say that didn't happen. Or maybe the kiss happened but relationship talks did not? It just doesn't fit the vibe I was going for here to have Veronica involved with someone else, even in a kinda-maybe-sorta way, is what I'm saying. Otherwise, consider this just picking up during the episode's final scene.

_ “Veronica! What are you wearing?” You turn to see Lilly sprinting towards you down the hallway of Neptune Junior High. _

_ (This is how it started. It’s got the blurry imprecision of all your memories, now, but you know, you’ll always know: it was as real as anything.) _

_ You frown. “My gym clothes? Because I have gym?” You’re just heading back to class after running an errand for Ms. Whitlock. _

_ “No,” says Lilly decisively, pulling you into the doorway of a darkened classroom. “You can’t go back to class like this! Honestly, Veronica, what have I told you about hiding your light?” _

_ Maybe this is an eighth-grader thing. “What do you mean?” This close, you can smell Lilly’s cinnamon lip gloss, and it’s all you can think about—the lip gloss, and the lips. _

_ “Look,” says Lilly, fingering your shirt. “Your shorts are practically down to your knees! And you know how great your legs are.” She grabs your shoulders, looks intently into your eyes. “You do know that, right? You have great legs, Veronica Mars.” _

_ You feel warm. “OK.” _

_ “Here’s how we do it,” says Lilly. She finds the waistband of your shorts, and folds them over twice, until they’re much shorter than before. She folds up the sleeves of your t-shirt, too. Her fingers brushing your skin are hot, or maybe that’s just your skin’s reaction. You find yourself missing the touch when she steps back to admire her handiwork. _

_ “There we go,” says Lilly, grinning. “We’ll make a grown-up women out of you yet, Veronica.” She moves to go, then turns back. Smiling, she presses a quick kiss to your lips, then runs off. _

_ You lick your lips, searching out the faint taste of cinnamon. _

* * *

“Now if I told you,” says Weevil, when you ask him what was in Lilly’s spy pen, “it wouldn’t really be a secret message pen. Would it?”

You look at him. Is he Lilly’s killer? Your gut says no, not now that you’ve heard him talk about Lilly, sounding just the way you do in your own head when you think about—everything. But gut feelings aren’t evidence. Trust is overrated.

“I probably know more of Lilly’s secrets than anyone,” you try. Not your best attempt at persuasion. The hallway is emptying out, everyone heading home for the weekend, chattering about their plans.

“What, so that gives you the right to all of them?” Weevil challenges. He twirls the empty pen between his fingers. He’s not telling you, but he’s also not leaving.

So you try what you tell yourself is a calculated last resort. Don’t examine it any more than that, not yet, not if you’re going to get the words out.

“Lilly and I, we were also kind of together. Sometimes. For a while.” The hallway is empty now, just the two of you, and maybe this was a bad idea. You’ve never told this to anyone apart from your dad, and now you’re telling Weevil? You plaster on a smile. This is a bargaining chip, not a confession. (Keep telling yourself that). “Fun fact.”

Weevil takes a moment to get it. You watch confusion change to understanding on his face. He grins, looks you up and down, eyes lingering. “Always full of surprises, huh?”

“You know it. So. About that pen.” You wiggle your eyebrows, letting the proverbial other shoe drop. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?”

He laughs, and it sounds the same as usual. You’re waiting for a comment about some hot girl-on-girl action, which you’d hate from most people but think you actually wouldn’t mind from Weevil. But instead he says, “Honestly, V, I wish I could help you, but the notes were just personal shit. You know, we’d pass it back and forth, make plans.”

“Bedroom plans?” Lilly and Weevil. You still can’t quite picture it in your head. But then, you’re sure most people couldn’t picture you and Lilly in bed either, not outside of some Girls Gone Wild scenario, anyway. Sometimes you barely believe it yourself, but you’ve got the memories to prove it, like a stack of pictures that are begging to be retaken of a moment you’ll never have again.

“Not just—” Weevil starts, stops, shakes his head. (Suck it up, Veronica. Everyone’s lost her.) “Why?” he says, voice smooth once again, “She teach you any moves?”

“Wouldn’t you like you know?”

“What happened to ‘I’ll show you mine’?” He smells like leather and motor oil, but for some reason it reminds you of Lilly’s many scents—the expensive perfume, the tanning lotion, the vanilla body butter. That cinnamon lip gloss. It’s overwhelming.

_ I could kiss him _ , you think. The thought startles you. You shake your head, step back.

“Sorry, man, gotta go. I’ll have to owe you. Put it on my balance sheet.” Finger guns, a wink. Your heart is pounding as you turn away.

* * *

_ “What would your dad say, if he found out?” _

_ The problem with memories is that they shed some part of their reality every time you replay them in your mind. Take this conversation: it happened, more or less, but it happened many times, and this memory, sickly green like a bad lens flair, is all those times, yet not quite any of them. _

_ Maybe you’re tanning beside the Kane pool, or maybe you’re in your old room, all magazine cutouts and open space, or maybe you’re in the photobooth down on the boardwalk. Maybe you just kissed her, breathtaking every time, or maybe you just told her you couldn’t, not anymore, not when you were dating her brother. _

_ This went on for a while, in one form or another, is what you’re saying. That must mean something, in the end. _

_ “He’d be fine with it, I know,” you say, and you do, you  _ do _ , “but you know the drill: no more sleepovers, all that stuff.” (Where is your mom in all this? Have you edited her out after the fact? Or did you not think about her approval at the time?) _

_ Lilly laughs. (Someday you might not quite remember that either, so you soak it up while you can, every time you replay this cobbled-together meta-memory). “Veronica Mars! Who knew you could be so devious?” _

_ “I’m not—OK, I am, but I don’t like it. Don’t make this—that’s not what this is about!” _

_ She kisses you now, if you’re kissing at this point. She always pulls away the slightest bit too soon, even when it feels like it’s gone on for hours. Always leaves you wanting more. Although maybe that says more about you than it does about her. _

_ “My mom would have a fit, and my dad would just totally deny it. It’ll be fun! Just waiting for the perfect moment,” she says, laughing. She’s terrified. You know her well enough to tell. Sometimes she looks at you and you can just imagine all the things she’s picturing losing. The Veronica of your memories may not have all that much first-hand experience in how cruel people can be, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have some guesses. _

_ Let's remember something else. That wasn’t all you were, was it? Some after-school special? Let’s go back to the laughter. The photobooth. Yes. You remember that day clearly. You’re wearing her bikini; she’s wearing your flip-flops. She pulls you inside the photobooth and it’s dark, so dark, after the glare of the California sun. You don’t know how she does it, but she slips in the money without you noticing, and then she kisses you, so you kiss back, not expecting that first flash of the camera. _

_ That’s picture one: you’re kissing, both of you utterly engrossed in each other. Picture two: you’re startled, she’s laughing, head thrown back. Picture three: you join in the laughter, falling onto her shoulder. Picture four: you kiss her this time. _

* * *

Just as you approach Lilly’s grave you spot Weevil. He’s spotted you too, you can tell, so there’s no point in turning back. You grit your teeth. You prefer to do this alone. Probably Weevil does too.

“Guess we’re both thinking of her tonight,” says Weevil as you take a spot beside him, facing the ornate headstone. His right fist is clenched tight and you stare in curiosity just a bit too long. He hasn’t brought flowers, and neither have you. You’ve only brought yourselves.

_ What’s in your hand?  _ you want to ask, but you hold yourself back. (Steady, steady.)

“How often do you come here?” you ask instead.

Weevil shrugs. “Whenever I feel like it.”

“Me too.” It’s not really that often. This isn’t the right way to remember her, and you know it in your gut whenever you come here. Yet here you are.

You have a joke building on your lips about how neither of you are goth enough for this, Friday night in a graveyard, something about offering to do his eyeliner, but Weevil sighs. “Go ahead, I know you’re dying to ask.” He holds out his fist, drops a single slip of paper into your outstretched palm. Jackpot. You unfold it. Lilly’s handwriting is just like you remembered, round and loopy, full of little flourishes.

_ Stop asking about the future!!!! I want you  _ now.

Your breath hitches. There’s a sudden descent of emotion, a guilt, all too familiar, a sense of pulling back curtains and then ending up the one exposed. (Story of your life). You can see from the folds how the message was compressed to fit inside a capsule in the spy pen. You hand the paper back to Weevil. He slips it into the breast pocket of his leather jacket, zipping it up carefully.

He turns to you. “You figure out who killed Lilly, you tell me.” He punches his hands together, closed fist against open palm, an unmistakable gesture.

“I’ll tell you after they’re safely behind bars,” you say. “For everyone’s sake.”

Weevil snorts. You both fall silent, a long moment of staring at the headstone, this engraved slab that’s supposed to quell loss in a way that’s got to be impossible. You remember why you don’t come here that often. It makes you want to burn the world down.

Weevil says, “Guess you should be getting home.”

Before you can stop yourself, you say, “I don’t want to.”

“Yeah,” says Weevil, “Me neither.”

And just like that, something has shifted between you. You know it like the tumblers of a lock falling into place at the jiggle of your bobby pin. You’ve stripped yourselves of excuses, and it happened so easily. Now nothing is keeping you here but yourselves. No honour, no duty, no strings.

_ I could kiss him.  _ It’s a drumbeat repetition pounding through you now. You’re pretty sure he’s thinking the same thing: parted lips, blown pupils. You’re facing each other, the headstone lingering in your periphery. Between you is Lilly and everything she represents, meanings on meanings, thick in the air. You step forward, and Weevil mirrors the movement. He raises his hand, cups your chin, movement slow, ready to pull back. You nod. He does not pull back.

His lips are hot against yours, and he kisses slow and firm,  _ almost _ hiding how much thought he puts into it. You see the crease in his forehead when you briefly open your eyes, though; he’s thinking out each move. You like it—it’s a game, back and forth, your mouths challenging, tongues responding. It’s a long moment before he breaks the kiss.

“Not to kill the mood,” he says, “but you wanna go somewhere that’s not a graveyard?”

You nod.

And that is how, one warm spring evening, you find yourself hopping the fence of the Neptune Community Pool with Eli Navarro.

* * *

_ Your last kiss, of course, is that night in the limo, drunken truth or dare. You giggle and try to act like it means nothing, like your entire world isn’t thrown off balance whenever Lilly kisses you. _

_In your mind, she kisses you over and over, leaning in, her edges less and less clear with each iteration. You focus on her, and everything else—Duncan, Logan, the car, the champagne—disappear, and that’s how you know it’s not a memory anymore, but a dream, a wish. But let’s forget for a minute that it hurts, forget that it’s hopeless. She kisses you like she’s a diver, picking the perfect pearl out of an ocean. She kisses you like she just came up with the best idea in the world._  

* * *

The chain link fence rattles as you climb over it and hop down onto the pool deck on the other side. You haven’t been to the community pool in years, but you remember swimming lessons here as a kid. It’s different at night, of course. Quiet. The last rays of sunlight are fading, and you can see an almost-full moon in the clear night sky above you. You and Weevil cast long shadows, stretching from where you’re standing into the water of the pool.

“You usually do this much breaking and entering on—” you’re about to say  _ the first date,  _ but you catch yourself just in time—“on a Friday night?”

“Maybe,” says Weevil.

“Let me guess—a no to the breaking, yes to the entering?” You catch his eye, and—oh. That feels different than it did before tonight, weighter now that you’ve acknowledged that there’s some core truth to the innuendos you always toss back and forth. For a moment you’re almost afraid, wonder if he is too, of what you might have lost.

“I was gonna say maybe you’re just a bad influence.”

“I like that you think I’m such a badass. It’s good for the ego.”

“Hey, always happy to stroke your ego.” He draws out the world  _ stroke  _ exaggeratedly, like maybe he’s trying to say you don’t have to lose any of it, or maybe he isn’t thinking about it at all, so you play along, mock-gasp and clutch imagined pearls, and he grins.

You shrug off your jacket, bend down, unlace your boots and pull off your socks and toss them aside. He follows suit as you roll up the legs of your jeans, and soon you’re both sitting on the  _ Caution: Deep End  _ tiles, dangling your legs in the water. You move your feet backwards and forwards, letting the sounds of your tiny waves mix with the sounds of the world around you, buzzing streetlights and snatches of music and two girls arguing through an open window. Cars whiz by on the street just out of sight, windows down or tops off, an endless Doppler effect of pop and rap and reggaeton.

“This is so much better than the pool in my building,” you say. “Every morning there’s a race between these three old women over who gets there first to do laps in flowered one-pieces, and last week two cats had a fight and fell in and then yowled about it for a solid hour right outside our front window.”

“Yeah, I bet it really sucks to have a pool.”

“Well,” you say, “it’s not  _ my _ pool. You ask any 09er, it’s not my pool if I have to share it.”

“I’ll be sure to keep that in mind next time I’m redecorating,” says Weevil.

You don’t like the turn this conversation is taking, or your part in taking it there. You want to apologize, but you also don’t, so you say, “Thanks for the introduction to the world of pool-hopping, though,” which is kind of an apology, maybe, if you squint.

Weevil laughs, and then you’re kissing again, legs still dangling in the water.

Sometimes you look back on everything with Lilly—and think of the way people look at you sometimes, with your short hair and combat boots—and you wonder if liking girls is the true essential core of you, if you’re just kidding yourself with the boys. And sometimes you kiss a boy, feeling it in your body as though this is the most desire it is possible to feel without bursting, and you wonder if you made it all up, your love for Lilly, if it was all just friendship and confusion and grief in the end. (How’s that for after-school special?)

But right now, you can believe it, that there’s room inside you for both. (And how’s that for innuendo?) Weevil tangles his hand in your hair, his other hand on your waist, and you run your palms over his neck and shoulders and back, feeling rippling muscles and imagining his tattoos rippling in tandem, and all that is real, and so is the way Lilly used to kiss you, straddling your lap and pressing up against you and encouraging your hands to wander.  _ Bisexual _ . You try the word out, roll it around in your head. Then, you stop thinking, and concentrate on kissing Weevil back.

When he pulls back, you lapse into silence. Your bottom lip feels raw, and you’re not sure if it’s from you biting it, or from him. You hope he isn’t waiting for you to bolt. You hope you won’t prove him right.

“So, remind me,” he says, “who’s doing who a favour right now?”

That’s not fair. You’ve already upset whatever delicate almost-friendship balance you two had going, but there’s no need for either of you to go out of your way to smash it to the ground. There’s no telling what either of you will need from each other tomorrow.

You say, “You told me about you and Lilly, now I’m telling you about me and Lilly. See? Quid pro quo.”

He laughs. His bicep is pressed against your shoulder, and his skin radiates heat. “So tell me, then.”

You shrug. You walked right into this one. “It started in middle school. She’d kiss me, and I had—feelings about it, whatever. She’d have boyfriends, and I did too sometimes, but we kept coming back to each other. When I started dating Duncan I made us stop. I figured we’d have—” you trail off.  _ More time _ , you figured you’d have  _ more time _ .

Weevil doesn’t make you clarify. “Who else you tell about this?”

“My dad got the hormonal-feelings-free version, afterwards.”

“Shit,” says Weevil, “she really was like no one else.”

Sitting here, memories swirling around you like chlorine, you finally let yourself admit it: you wish you had given in to Lilly’s insistent pestering after you called it off, instead of trying to be a good girlfriend, a good person. There’s a part of you that regrets not cheating on Duncan, and god, that’s not something you want to know about yourself. The water is too cold, all of a sudden. You should be getting home. Your dad will be worried. It’s just—it’s nights like these that make the beckoning freedoms of adulthood seem worth all the attendant moral quagmires and petty hypocrisies and other assorted sordid human failings that go along with it.

You must be quiet for longer than is acceptable, even when thinking about dead maybe-girlfriends, because Weevil says, “What’s eating you, V?” He splashes water at you, and it makes him seem younger. So many things have conspired to make you both seem older than you are, but just like the thing about having your own pool, you sort of get that it’s different for Weevil than for you.

You smile and splash him back.

Weevil wouldn’t have time for your 09er teen soap melodrama, even if you wanted to share it, which you don’t. Honestly. So instead you say, “I was thinking about how we’re kind of like Lilly’s secret lover’s club. Makes me feel—well, not exactly exclusive, but like there’s a certain cachet. Maybe we should make little membership cards.”

Weevil snorts. “Exclusive my ass. You ever wonder how many others she had?”

“Quite a few, if memory serves.” You’d be willing to bet you could list them all. You remember a whole string of giggly Saturdays, smooth legs sprawled on beach towels, Lilly sharing her latest experience, latest conquest. (Of course you were jealous. But that was never the dominant emotion. It’s not the emotion you feel now, looking back.)

“She have anyone else right near the end? She seemed...different, some days.” Weevil’s fingers are on your thigh, now, rubbing slow circles, your feet still dangling in the rippling pool water. You move into the touch and shake your head.

“Not that I know of—but then, I didn’t know about you.”

Weevil laughs, but you barely hear it, because something clicks all of a sudden. You’ve always been willing to bet you could list all of Lilly’s lovers...but up until you listened in on a few confidential guidance counsellor sessions earlier this year, that’s a bet you now know you would have lost.  _ She have anyone else right near the end?  _ Maybe, maybe not. But clearly Lilly kept more secrets from you than you imagined.

With that thought, you’re on your feet, Weevil’s hand falling to his side as you rise. The evening breeze raises goosebumps on the wet skin of your calves and feet.

“You gotta go already?” says Weevil. He looks—resigned, kind of, or maybe it’s just the shadows. It’s not an expression you like seeing on him, and you almost wince. You get it—who’s to say what any of this will mean in the morning?

“Sorry,” you say, genuinely regretful, even as your heart pounds in nervous anticipation of what you now know will occupy the next part of your night, “but my dad’s got this new thing where he waits by the window with a shotgun when I don’t come home.” Not that you’re going home now, of course.

“He must be scaring all the old ladies fighting over the pool.”

You weren’t planning to, but you kneel down and kiss Weevil one more time, your hand on his shirt, his gripping your hips after one startled moment. You like this, you do. Whatever it means.   

But you’ve got somewhere else you need to be. It’s a hunch, but hunches have a way of consuming you, and you need to see this one burn out, one way or another. You pull your socks on over still-wet feet, and start doing up your boots.

Here’s one last hazy-green memory for you: back when he was sheriff—a lifetime ago—your dad sat you down one evening and said,  _ Nine times out of ten, a women gets killed, it’s her boyfriend or husband. Sweetie, if you ever think anything seems scary, or just off somehow, in one of your friend’s relationships, or your own, you tell me, OK?  _ He’d just gotten home, still in uniform, and you were just old enough to notice he was tired. You nodded, and tried not to look terrified at everything his speech implied.

You don’t know who else Lilly might have been seeing, or whether they could have been her killer, but you know where she would have hid any evidence, and you can’t imagine not going after it right this minute. And you can’t very well ask Weevil to break into the Kane house for the second time this week.


End file.
